SiteCrafting Blah Blah Blog

Nov. 15, 2007 at 6:50am

DNS propogation explained

There's always plenty of tech-speak flying around among developers in the office. I certainly try to keep such language at a minimum when working with clients but sometimes it just works its way in there. DNS and other domain-related processes can be pretty confusing, period, let alone to someone anxious for their website to go live. So how to explain DNS propogation?

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Comments (1) | Posted in Odds 'n Ends, Web Hosting by Kevin Freitas

Sep. 6, 2007 at 4:45pm

Adventures in Database Migration Pt. I

Fie on commas! Fie!

SiteCrafting is in the process of phasing out some of our older servers, and as an added bonus, the clients hosted on those servers are getting a MySQL jumpstart, leapfrogging over 4.1 to go straight from 4.0.24 to 5.0.32. Tragically, it's not quite as simple as dump | import. This is what I get for bothering my bosses for a few weeks not long after coming aboard about how nice stored procedures, updatable views, and triggers could be.

"The wonderful thing about standards," a wiser person than me once said, "is that there are so many of them." That's not the whole of it, though. One good thing about standards is that there are certain features one can generally rely upon to work, translate, port, etc. Assuming one works within them, rather than taking advantage of loopholes allowed by their not-entirely-compliant-but-we're-getting-there-and-anyway-isn't-this-way- easier-and-faster software. When people don't (and I'm not entirely innocent here), you run the risk of turning your simple upgrade into a serious project when your favorite software decides it's time to comply a bit more.

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Comments (5) | Posted in MySQL, Web Hosting by Joe Izenman

Nov. 15, 2006 at 9:12pm

Master of Your Domain

Take control from domain slammers and scammers

It begins with a letter or maybe even an "invoice". It ends with the transfer of your domain to another registrar and in some cases even the loss of your domain entirely.  The term for this is Domain Slamming.

The practice preys upon unsuspecting people who want to pay their bills and keep their domain names current. After all, we have our domain name printed on every invoice, business cards, painted on our trucks, and we advertise with Google Adwords, we don't want our domain to expire. This is exactly what they count on. 

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Comments (2) | Posted in Security, Web Hosting by Brian Forth